The band’s first album in a decade is more haunted than its arena-sized choruses suggest.
Dross Glop is scattershot, meandering, awkward, and often boring.
Liars’s “No. 1 Against the Rush” is a tight arrangement of gloomy dance music.
Unlike in the past, when Jason Pierce stirred the pot and made something new, it doesn’t cohere in the way the best Spiritualized albums have.
Monica’s on-point vocal turns are squandered on some cliché-addled songs and embarrassingly cheap-sounding production.
Boys & Girls is curiously and deliberately subdued.
I Love You, It’s Cool fails to deliver on the promise of Beast Rest Forth Mouth.
“Kill for Love” is, on the surface, enraptured, but more than just a little creepy.
Folila speaks both to the increasing currency of African pop and the shrinking size of the world.
Though you could call Roman Reloaded schizophrenic, the better word would be noncommittal.
Beneath all the shattering percussion, well-timed sound crashes, and plethora of borrowed ideas, the album is rather skeletal.
There’s a reason the comments section of Howse’s “VBS” is littered with words like “boner” and “orgasm.”
T Bone Burnett has become the go-to guy when it comes to roots-music soundtracks.
THEESatisfaction can’t be accused of not bringing themselves.
Rocket Juice & the Moon is an album full of red herrings.
Madonna pilfers the title of one of her earliest rivals’ songs during the hook of “Girl Gone Wild,” only to defang it of its feminist bent.
In some sense, Port of Morrow is the classic pop album that James Mercer has always been on the verge of making.
The latest track from Nas’s forthcoming Life Is Good won’t remind anyone of Illmatic.
While You & I loses some of the distinctive details of its predecessor, the duo pulls off “conventional” just as well as they do twisted.
Radio Music Society makes it clear that Spalding’s a fine, intuitive singer and a natural bandleader.
As the music portion of the festival, and SXSW itself, draws to a close, there’s a lot to consider.